VLADIMIR PUTIN has raised a glass to the Scot who brought football to Russia only to be arrested by the Bolshevik secret police and left to die in a grimy Moscow prison.

The astonishing story of St Petersburg-born Arthur MacPherson was revealed this week as the Russian Football Union celebrated theircentenary with a gala dinner in the city attended by Putin, FIFA chief Sepp Blatter and UEFA boss Michel Platini.

Russia is preparing to host the World Cup in 2018 and prime minister Putin used the dinner to honour the memory of MacPherson, a wealthy timber merchant and stock exchange dealer with a passion for sport.

MacPherson was president of the Russian Football Federation for two years from their foundation in 1912 and had played for a team in the city.

Scots helped develop football around the world, particularly in South America, but until now their influence in Russia has been largely unheralded.

Gareth Ward, Britain’s consul general in St Petersburg, said: “The first Russian football league was set up in 1901 and at its core was the Nevka team of Scottish players from the Samson weaving mill in St Petersburg.

“Allegedly football was encouraged by the mill owners to distract the workers from drinking vodka on Sundays.”

MacPherson was born in the city in 1870 after his grandfather Murdoch MacPherson emigrated from Perth in the late 1830s.

A civil engineer, Murdoch owned a shipyard on the Clyde and served Russia’s Imperial Family before setting up a steelworks and shipyards in St Petersburg. He later married Julia Elizabeth Maxwell, from Nithsdale, and they had 15 children, including Arthur’s father David, who was born in the family’s adopted city in 1842.

Arthur, a keen rower, also led the All-Russian Union of lawn tennis clubs from 1908 until the revolution and organised the first international tennis tournament in Russia. In 1911 he was elected a member of the Russian Olympic Committee.

In 1914 he was awarded the Order of Saint Stanislaus by Tsar Nicholas II, the first time anyone in the country had been decorated for their services to sport.

Arthur had two sons, Robert and Arthur junior. Robert served with the 8th Cameron Highlanders on HMS Hampshire but died aged 19 when his ship was sunk off the Orkneys during the First World War.

Arthur junior also served with the Cameron Highlanders and survived the war before being enrolled as a British secret service spy. A keen tennis player, he played six times at the US Open from 1917 and also at Wimbledon in 1920 and 1923.

However, Arthur senior’s life was to end in tragedy.

He was arrested by the Bolsheviks following the October Revolution in 1917 and imprisoned. It was reported he had been shot for serving British interests but he had been taken from St Petersburg to a Moscow jail for several months, where he contracted typhoid.

No medical assistance was ever offered and MacPherson died towards the end of 1919.

The London Times reported: “His body then disappeared. Some weeks later, three British soldiers, who had obtained permission to look for it, discovered it in one of the prison cells, buried beneath 40 others.

“They recognised it, as, before his death, Mr MacPherson had pasted a piece of paper around his wrist, bearing his name.”

Arthur MacPherson is buried in the Smolensk Lutheran Cemetery in St Petersburg in a humble plot for a Scottish and Russian sporting giant.